Residents will have two opportunities next week to learn about Oak Park leaders’ plans to remake the village’s zoning code, with hopes that the reforms refresh the local housing stock.
The village has partnered with several consulting firms on a months-long community engagement effort supporting planned reforms to the village’s zoning code, namely the potential elimination of all single-family housing only zones from Oak Park’s zoning map. Village leaders’ hope is that the reform would allow for more “missing middle housing” to be built in neighborhoods that currently only allow for single-family residences in response to high housing costs.
Missing middle housing is defined as “a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units – compatible in scale and form with detached single-family homes – located in a walkable neighborhood.” It usually looks like duplexes, triplexes or small apartment buildings that can accommodate a few families, often in blocks that also have single-family homes.
Oak Park’s village board voted last August to award a contract to Opticos Design, an architectural firm specialized in zoning reform, to study eliminating Oak Park’s single-family zones from the zoning map. The consultant group’s plan for the project hinges on a community-wide education and awareness campaign and analysis of how zoning reform would impact the village’s housing supply
Oak Park residents are invited to participate in two workshops on the topic next week, one at 7 p.m. Monday, March, 2 at the Community Recreation Center on Madison Street and another at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 4 at the Oak Park Main Library on Lake Street.
The workshops are meant to answer resident questions, gather feedback and make the case for how eliminating the village’s single-family zones could create new housing opportunities, according to Kristian Gist, who works for the village’s community engagement consultant for the project All Together Studios.
Gist said community engagement efforts over the last few months have included surveys, pop-up events and meetings with local real estate professionals.
“My role on this project has kind of been about how we make this highly technical conversation more accessible to someone who has no experience with zoning and maybe doesn’t know what the word zoning means and someone who’s like an expert,” Gist said. “I wouldn’t say we’ve seen a lot of opposition towards updating the zoning code, more so just questions about it.”
“I would say that in comparison to other places we’ve worked with, Oak Park is being very proactive.”
While reforming zoning would be a major step, it likely wouldn’t yield massive short-term changes. The reforms would be made with “right sized development” and have guardrails in place so the types of new constructions could be built in residential neighborhoods, Gist said.
The village already has a lot of “missing middle” housing types, particularly in south Oak Park. Oak Park also has relatively few tracts of developable land, so the impact of the reforms would be more subtle than they’d be in other communities, Gist said.
“I think Oak Park is taking a leadership role here by updating the zoning, taking a look at it but it’s not in a way that this update is going to be huge,” Gist said. “It’s going to be small, subtle adjustments that allow for more housing adjustments that allow for more housing but still preserve Oak Park’s character, so it’s still a place where you can see the sky without the shadows of buildings casting down over you or wind tunnels.”
The engagement effort comes after village trustees have made it clear that reforming the zoning map was a legislative priority. Trustees have linked the village’s zoning code to the legacy of northern cities using zoning codes to covertly enforce racial segregation through elements like single-family building requirements.
Two trustees — Cory Wesley and Brian Straw — voted against ratifying the village’s zoning code last May in protest of the inclusion of the single-family zones. While the village board is required by state law to ratify the code each year, the trustees voted ‘no’ on the map to show how much reforming the code matters to them.
Following that conversation, Village President Vicki Scaman said the board was primed to make the transformative change.
“What I’m hearing tonight is when that comes forward to us in the (Requests for Proposals) that we will be ready to act,” she said in May. “I just think that we will be a pretty amazing group to host the conversation and the sense of urgency is heard.”
